The cords arrived today. Quail's quoted shipping times are pretty good.
I just finished wrestling with both my 5.1 and 2.0 (headphone) rigs, replacing stock IEC power cords with Quails. In my headphone rig put a 2' 14AWG on my source and a 4' 14AWG on my GLite's DPS. I've had them running for all of 10 minutes now, and I'm not going to claim I hear a discernible difference ...yet. I'm using unfamiliar headphones (new DT880s) and a record I don't know well (Bauhaus - Gotham CD2) but it sure sounds
good.
This won't be a situation where I will be A/Bing anything. Switching power cords is enough of a PITA that doing it once is plenty. What I am curious about is burning in these cables. I've burned in more headphones and interconnects that I care to think about (I build a rig specifically for that purpose.) The process is fairly simple: send white noise through them for 100-150 (or more) hours. For headphones, I use a volume slightly above my normal listening level. For ICs, it's a line level signal, period. Of course,
none of this applies to power cords. I've read (most of) markl's
massive roundup, and he makes it quite clear that the character of power cords changes significantly with burn-in. What is less clear is
how one burns them in. How much current is necessary? Certainly my source and DPS pull some juice in standby mode, but I doubt it's sufficient.
What I foresee happening is no dedicated process of power cord burn-in, but rather they gain hours of usage along with the rest of my system. Changes will happen slowly. I suspect I will start to notice improvements by the middle of next month, but beyond that I cannot say.
